Monday, November 19, 2012

How to make a blog into a real website

This article explains how you can use Blogger to make a site that looks just like any other website and why you might, sometimes, want to do this.

Blogs vs Websites

Some people are very happy to use Blogger to make a blog, that is, website that looks like a diary or journal that they write in regularly.

But others aren't. So a common question is "how to I make my blog into a real website, just like "someone" has done over at "this website"?

This isn't easy to answer: Not everyone means the same thing when they say "real website". "Someone" might have just changed the background image, installed a third-party theme, changed a few settings - or re-written the entire Blogger theme file! They may have just made the blog look more professional than the basic themes do - or maybe they've removing all "blog" features so that the site is like a regular brochure website.

The bottom-line is that, even with no changes a blog is a "real website", because it's got:

An url (www.your-blog-name.blogspot.com)

A space on the internet that's dedicated just to it. (For Blogger users, that space is inside Google's servers - we don't have to pay for our own hosting).

Web-pages, made in HTML, which visitors can look at using a web-browser (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc)

And there are some sites which are not at all ashamed to look like blogs, for example:

You need to do more work to make the second type of site - and even then, if a knowledgeable visitor looks at the source-code for a page, they can still tell that you're using Blogger. So, usually, I'd recommend that you focus on what you want to achieve with the site, rather than "getting rid of blogger".

That said, here is a lit of things that you may want to to do to "turn your blog into a website". They are in, roughly, the order that I recommend doing them to have the maximum effect.

Initial steps to reduce the "bloggy" feeling

1) Get a custom domain

This is a website address like www.mySite.com or www.yourBlog.org - or whatever available name that you choose.

Using a custom domain means that your address will not have "blogspot.com" in it.

This step is essential if you don't want the site to be perceived as blog, because the address is what people see when they first find the site in search-engine results.

If you are going to get a custom-domain, then I strongly recommend doing it at the very beginning of setting up your blog, so all the later steps are based on the custom-domain name rather than re-directions. This is is A Good Thing for SEO - and even if SEO doesn't matter for your blog initially it may become important later on.

8) Add an RSS-subscription gadget using Feedburner.
Some people say this is optional - but I believe that all "proper" websites offer an RSS feed and show that they do so by using a feedburner-style RSS chiclet. If you just add Blogger's Subscribe gadget instead, it gives the Atom - ie blog-style feed.

Banishing the Blogger look for good

These next steps really go together: if you do one, you need to do the others too. They are needed if you totally want to remove the blog-ish-ness:

9) Remove all gadgets that show a list of posts. These include the Archive, Labels. This is simply the reverse of the add-a-gadget procedure - edit the existing gadget, and click Remove.

11) Set up your own navigation system: every post or page needs to be able to be accessed from either a button or a link that is in either a gadget or another post/page.

It's temping to think about navigation from the home page. But first-time visitors who come to your site from search-results will not arrive at the home page. They might not even think to look at the home page. Ideally your navigation system should offer several routes to get to every piece of information, and should include both logical links between posts anda search-based option.

Tools that you might use to help with this:

Summary posts, with links to detail pages about the topic. (Eg my public-transport site has a "city buses details" page, which links to individual route maps)

Linked-List gadgets to show summary posts, or lists of related detail posts, in the sidebar or footer.

An alternative to your own navigation system is to use categories to put your posts into pages. This doesn't fully reduce the bloggy feeling, since someone who looks at a page sees a list of posts (with just post-summaries if you've used jump-links). However changing the the status message (the grey box that says "showing all posts with label whatever") can make this acceptable in some sites (ie ones where the line between blog and website is blurred).

Hi, Mary. In the end of your article you've asked "What else would you do?" well, I think we can't forget the useful conditional tags.Using conditional tags I made my homepage without the need of custom-redirect.Also the html5 and css3 can make wonders to the design and function of a blog/website, I'm recently using just them and avoiding Javascript.I created a one page website for myself in blogger, unfortunately the slider in the front page works fine in Mozilla, but not in Chrome, I'm gonna fix it soon if possible.

I love blogger and have used it for the past 6 years. It is so easy to use - add posts, pages, the gadgets. I do want to de-blog the look of my site, but I don't want to do the whole finding a web host and website builder. I want blogger! I purchased my own domain name from godaddy. I'm fortunate to have a friend who is a graphic designer - she is designing my logo and header. I'll use the tips above to get the look I want and keep blogger! P.S. BLOGGER IS A REAL WEBSITE!